Down Deep
by Threepwillow
Summary: It ought to be illegal to be this depressed on your birthday, but it's two months since, and Kelly cannot take it. :::Oneshot, Nathan/Kelly, spoilers for season finale:::


(**AN:** wrote this before I realized how common of a fic plot it probably was, and in hindsight I can't imagine why that didn't occur to me. First venture into the Misfits fandom so be gentle! lol.)

_**Down Deep**_

"I feel like shit." The community center van hits another bump in the streets, and Kelly thunks her knees into the back of Curtis's seat again.

He leans around from in front. "Ain't it your birthday?"

Shit. She didn't think she told them. "Yeah, but it's two months since, innit?"

Two months since, and here she is still working off her service, fucking about in this stupid white van, and it's overcast. Lots of days it sort of feels like it's _always_ overcast, like it'll never get sunny again. But those days it just feels like that, y'know, meteorologically. Today Kelly can feel it in her _soul_ or something.

Today of all days.

"Ought to be illegal to be depressed on your fuckin' birthday," says Alisha, checking her makeup in the mirror of a little compact she's produced from fuck-knows-where down the front of her tits.

"Yeah well we all done sommat illegal or we wouldn't be here would we," Kelly snarls.

"Look, I'm just sayin' if it were _my_ birthday I'd be tryin' to have a good time 'stead of just mopin' around." She pops her lipstick. "Untwist your knickers for fuck's sake."

Kelly rounds on her, knocks the compact to the floor, gets in Alisha's face. Because seriously? "You wouldn't know what that's like, would ya, bein' as you don't never wear any."

"Listen, you twat – " begins Alisha, reaching a hand out to Kelly's hair, and just as she lunges Curtis curves lightning-fast between them to haul them apart.

"Shit, guys, stoppit!" He's got one hand against the inside crook of Kelly's shoulder and one gripping the back of Alisha's collar, careful as always not to touch her skin. It's second nature to him now, which is really fucking weird now that Kelly thinks about it. How has this shit become so ingrained into their lives, like it's totally normal? And how the fuck is he doing this in a van, even one that's rolling to a stop?

"Knock it off back there, you lot," grumbles their probation worker, who's driving, kind of picking up on everything after the fact. Kelly thinks he's probably the worst one yet.

"Look," says Curtis after a minute, "no one's happy he's dead. I'm sorry, Kelly. Happy birthday, yeah?"

"Whotever." She shrugs out of his grip harder than necessary and unbuckles her seatbelt, worming out after Alisha does to stand on the grimy path of the park, where they've ended up. After she gets out Alisha's still rummaging on the floor of the van for her compact for a couple of seconds.

And then, _Whatever is right,_ Kelly hears out of thin air. _He was livin' out a community center and doin' fucking nothing, what did he have to lose._

And it's two months since, and Kelly cannot take it.

"_Fuck_ you, Alisha!" She slams the door of the van shut almost before Alisha is fully out of it, and storms away to their project assignment. Alisha almost starts to chase after her, shouting.

"Oi, if you didn't want to hear it, you shouldn't be _fucking_ listening, yeah?" She stuffs her compact back down the front of her jumpsuit. Curtis sighs, and scowls a little.

Simon, in the wake of it all, nervously flattens down his hair. "This's why I miss Nathan," he murmurs. "He was a prick, but at least we could all hate him, and he didn't really care. Now we just hate each other."

(But nobody hears him.)

Their latest probation worker, the guy who drove the van, is a tall, ugly, weedy-looking guy who's balding on top and has got kind of a ponytail in the back. He looks almost like he should be serving time with them rather than watching over them. Kelly hates him, like she hated the last two. He always gets them projects where she and Alisha have to bend over, and he spends way too much time staring at their arses. It's just one more fucking thing, on an overcast day like this. Never mind two months, Kelly can count the days, the hours, pretty much the minutes. She never even leaves out those weird in-between days where she was Not Kelly, where he was the only sane one among them, like she thought she might – she's become kind of obsessive. And it's weird, because she thinks having one thing to focus her thoughts on is strengthening her powers, thinks she could kind of feel/"hear" Alisha's bitchiness earlier and it kind of curled down deep into her own, not even words, just presence, just feeling. And Kelly has always kind of liked her powers, but she's not sure if she wants them if this is the price they come with, thinking too hard, feeling too much.

So she kind of "hears" Simon coming. "Here," he says, suddenly hovering over her, reaching down with an orange bell-shaped flower in his outstretched hand, one of the ones they're supposed to be planting in the new offshoot of the garden in the park. "For your birthday. It kind of...matches the jumpsuits, dunnit?"

Kelly bites her lip and doesn't quite smile, but feels closest to it as she has all day. "Thanks," she says, and jams the short stem it has left down behind her ear, before jamming her trowel back into the dirt, and spooning in another stupid petunia.

"I wanted to get you a real gift," says Simon, "but I'm crap at shopping for people. Especially for girls."

"I don't need your fucking presents."

He goes back to refill the wheelbarrow.

She didn't realize that the overcast sky was legitimate, was _real_, and wasn't just inside her head and her fucking heart, until in the middle of their gardening project it starts to rain. The planting soil beneath her hands turns instantly to muck, and Alisha hisses out expletives as they all crawl back to standing in what has quickly become a downpour.

Kelly hates storms, any more.

"Looks like we're rained out!" shouts their scrawny supervisor over the rumbling rain, ogling Kelly through the soaking-wet material of her jumpsuit. "Meet back at the center tomorrow and we'll try again. So sorry."

"No you're not!" Curtis shouts back at him, but he doesn't hear. Kelly "hears" him not hear. And that's just fucking weird.

The rain is the last straw, then – the last straw in a whole day of last straws, in two whole months of last straws. Kelly knows what she needs to do, she's wanted to do it all day, was going to wait until she'd managed to get it together a little better but there's no hope for it now: She takes off running. Not back toward the community center van that brought them out to the park, but in the direction of the cemetery.

_You're going to see him,_ come Simon's thoughts, clear and unaddled by the rain. The second piece of it, the hesitant eagerness, the _maybe I'll tag along,_ sort of hangs around it subconsciously. Because Kelly's getting better and better at sensing those kinds of things. And sometimes it kind of scares her.

"I want to fucking be alone with him!" she shouts, before taking off for good.

And she does. She needs to be alone with him. But she needs being alone with him not to mean _being alone._

There's no thunder with the rain, but it's a fucking downpour, and between that and running as hard as she is – she only stops once the whole way there, to avoid getting hit by a weird guy in a hooded sweatshirt on a bicycle – she can barely even breathe by the time she gets to his. _Nathan Young._ Young. He's dead too fucking young.

"Nathan," she chokes out, and is it because she can't breathe or because she's crying? "Nathan, it's my birthday, and I can't bloody do this." She sort of collapses to the ground on top of it...him...the spot, like her arms want to move to hug something but there's nothing to hug. The rain hammers on. She's pretty much kneeling in mud. It tears the flower from her hair and beats it into the dirt by the stone marker, and it's only then that it occurs to Kelly to have put it there at all.

"Two months now, you know that?" she says. "Sixty-one days, 'cause June's only got thirty yeah, and now it's my fucking birthday." She sniffles, trying to get some air. She thinks she's probably never been stuck in a rain this hard, so hard she can't get enough breath – something's stifling her. Curled into the back of her throat, and deep down the back of her mind.

Someone else can't breathe.

_Jesus fuck, is somebody up there or what?_

"NATHAN!" Kelly screams, falling down closer to the ground, practically shoving her face in the mud but she doesn't care now, it's too late anyway. "_Nathan is that you, can you hear me?_"

She "hears" him sort of sense her, but he doesn't know it's her, but he broadcasts back out anyway, in a way that sounds kind of rehearsed, like he's been _hoping_... _Oi, if someone up there can hear me thinkin', I'm not fuckin' dead!_

"_Nathan I'm here! I'm coming!_" She's screaming so hard her throat hurts, and she coughs a little, and claws into the soggy dirt with her bare hands and with the trowel she's still got hooked through the loop in her jumpsuit. It's slow going, but the rain makes it easier. The only good thing a storm like this has ever done.

Whose brilliant idea was it to bury people so _fucking_ deep in the ground, anyway?

By the time she makes it to him, the rain has mostly stopped. She can hear him rattling around inside the coffin, through the thin layer of soil that's still there, and she claws through everything trying to find the way to get it open. She has to stomp on it a few times. She "hears" Nathan wince at every one.

_Yep, that's gotta be her._

He knows. And now she _knows_ she's crying. She flings open the top half of the lid and a bunch of dirt falls in on his face but he's there, he's there _he's there_ and he is fucking _alive_, and he wiggles his legs out of the half that's still closed and stumbles to his feet. He has a hard time standing, after two months of lying down, and leans hard on her shoulders. He's excited about it. She is too.

"You're fuckin' _alive_," she whispers.

"It's...my power," he croaks, readjusting his voice to speaking. "I actually got one. I can't die. Which fucking sucks when all you want for bloody months is a cheeseburger."

She blinks. "What?"

"I was _starving_ in there, and I didn't have any food, but I couldn't die of starvation either..." He groans a little, tries to stand on his own again, fails, heaves harder onto her. "Fortunately not eating also meant I never had to take a shit."

"Eugh, Nathan," she says with a grimace, like she'd done a dozen times or more before, and for a brief flashing second she's done something between them like this is all back to normal. When she realizes it she gasps, and they both start laughing. And then she starts crying. Again.

"Hey now, gorgeous, your mascara'll run," he says, never mind that the rain's poured it all over her face already anyway.

"Everything was shit without you," she says, clutching at his jacket.

"Yes, well," he says, "we can't all be this wonderful."

She kisses him.

He tastes like dirt, and like someone who hasn't brushed his teeth in two months, and a little bit, she realizes, like death. It's absolutely disgusting. She wants to do it for hours.

He's confused and doesn't kiss back. "All right, now I know I'm dead."

"You're fucking _alive_," she hisses again. "I can't believe it took me two whole months to hear you down there. I'm so sorry."

"Two months, y'say?" he says.

"Exactly two," she tells him. "Cuz it's my birthday."

"Well then by all means, Merry fucking Christmas," he says, and he clings to her, because he needs to to stand, but also he just wants to hold her close, because she can feel/"hear" everything before it's coming, including his thick excited desperate wonderful kiss, which is the best present she has ever gotten.

No offense to Simon's flower.


End file.
